The main aim of the UN climate summit at Durban, which began on November 28 and runs until December 9, is to produce an agreement about targets for emissions by developed countries, and longer term targets from developing countries. But with sudden switches in energy policies, environmental regulations and accidents such as Fukushima, plus increasing financial fragility, national governments, especially here in Europe, are increasingly aware how policy in these areas impacts on everyone’s lives as well as the economy.

Decision-makers thus have a great responsibility and a very difficult task to pursue long term objectives at the same time, especially about climate change. The key question is how best to do this, and should this involve only regional, national and city-level policies, or are binding global agreements also necessary?

Especially here in Europe, governments have become more cautious about signing up to new long lasting and tightly defined transnational agreements that might affect their flexibility to respond to changing circumstances. Moreover, a global deal on climate change may be less effective than regional, national and city level initiatives because global treaties are sometimes perceived as insensitive to the different technologies and time scales for emission reduction in varying countries.

No government yet endorses the extreme position of some economists that future economic growth will lead to the panacea of limitless technological solutions in the future. However, governments with rapidly growing populations and developing technology, such as many of those in Asia and Africa, will need longer to get to grips with their emissions than those with falling populations and advanced technology such as here in Europe. The influential Stern report on the economics of climate change does not take this into account.

So should Durban concentrate on what may ultimately prove to be unproductive negotiations on a comprehensive, global agreement? Or would it be wiser to find a more collaborative way to respond to climate change?

Underlying the current stalemate between developed countries such as Canada, Russia and Japan and key developing countries like China and India on a global climate deal is a sup-optimal negotiations process. As proved the case in Copenhagen, hugely ambitious political deals are being discussed which are neither ripe for agreement now, nor framed to inspire people to act and collaborate on both a local and regional level.

This is not, however, to deny the importance of the UN process — it creates political pressure to do more. But Durban is much more likely to be successful if it focuses on engaging and enabling the rapidly growing and diverse array of regional, national and city-level climate change mitigation and adaptation measures already in place — such as the European carbon trading system. The latter, despite its mixed record due to early design flaws, is already proving of significant interest for countries looking to introduce their own carbon trading systems, including Asian countries like South Korea and potentially China too.

Rather than looking to the global big picture, governments across the world are focusing like a laser right now on the problems climate change are causing them specifically (which can vary dramatically from country to country), and finding their own ways to deal with them (rather than seeking a globally-prescribed guide for this). For instance, coastal nations such as The Netherlands are increasingly at risk from rising sea levels, whereas China (now the world’s largest emitter of CO2 emissions) is increasingly at risk of heat-waves, floods, droughts and desertification. China’s numerous ‘megacities’ (those of 10 million or more inhabitants) are especially at risk of heat-waves.

Given the particular challenge for urban areas, cities are helping to lead the charge to action. Right now, municipal governments are adopting some of the most innovative ways of adapting to worsening climate hazards, including showing how to integrate these measures with considerable savings in costs — such as putting wind turbines on dykes as in Rotterdam. City governments often have greater scope to experiment with solutions than national government, and giving them even more responsibility to tackle climate change would probably help expedite national solutions.

This growing patchwork of regional, national, and city levels initiatives would benefit immensely at Durban if improved frameworks can be agreed for collaboration. These should include deals to facilitate inter-governmental cooperation on tackling emissions, and sharing technology and expertise.

A productive outcome at Durban would also include better enablement of private sector innovation to reduce emissions and mitigation of the consequences of climate change. What is needed here are more initiatives like the Carbon Disclosure Project which collects self-reporting of emissions and emissions reduction strategies by firms worldwide, offering the opportunity for learning from one another’s solutions.

In summary, Durban would achieve most if it was a realistic meeting aimed at enabling and strengthening different regional, national and city initiatives across the world to reduce emissions in the short to medium term and relate these programmes to sustainability in general. Unlike other recent UN meetings like Copenhagen, scientists should be there too explaining how the most effective local actions should be related to mitigating local climate change and the particular effects in each region. These need to be measured much more comprehensively.

The UN process on climate change is important. But, negotiations and even promises on paper do not reduce emissions — only action on the ground can achieve that.

Image — A protester gestures in front of a banner outside the COP17 (Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Climate Change) venue in Durban November 28, 2011. REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko

The world population has officially reached seven billion, according to the UN. This historic landmark reminds us of the massive challenges, including here in Europe, created by an ever-increasing number of humans on the planet.

Growing populations are also driving another mega trend — urbanisation through migration. In 1800, less than 3 percent of the population lived in cities (mainly in Europe), yet by the end of 2008, this had risen to more than 50 percent (much higher still in Europe), and there were 26 megacities (cities of 10 million or more inhabitants), including Moscow, Paris and London.

Despite the economic success of megacities, governments at every level are preparing for the growing risks that these massive urban centres pose. For instance, will it be possible to continually meet the everyday needs of food, water and health, and also deal with the growing vulnerability of megacities to environmental stresses exacerbated by the effects of climate change?

There is already cause for some alarm. For instance, the 2003 heat-wave in Paris was so devastating because both the public and authorities were unprepared for dealing with such extreme weather conditions, which were exacerbated by building practices, especially the lack of air-conditioning. Moreover, the tsunami in Japan this year forced Tokyo to re-consider its approach to nuclear power and to protecting its cities.

During the 21st Century, megacities in Europe and across the world will continue to grow, as will other large urban conglomerations, such as the Rhine-Ruhr and Po Valley, which have megacity features. Energy demands will thus increase as supplies of food, water and resources for industries and infrastructure require energy for transportation.

The associated increased carbon emissions are contributing to global warming and pose their own climate risks. In China, where people are being subsidised to move from the countryside, cities have grown by a factor of 2 in only 5 years. The local urban ‘heat island’ effect means temperatures are increasing about three times faster than the rate of temperature rise over global and national land areas.

The main risk for riverine megacities on coastal plains is their increasing vulnerability to rising sea levels and river flooding, such as those devastating Bangkok right now. There will be further episodes such as the one in New Orleans six years ago when it was hit by Hurricane Katrina, without adequate protection and flood warning systems.

In at-risk countries, such as the Netherlands, researchers are preparing for these type of problems. For instance, Delft University’s Hydraulic Engineering Department has been developing a state of the art early warning and monitoring system, including the effects of subsidence, to protect coastal communities.

The larger the urban area, the greater the damage that natural hazards can inflict; and increasingly it may be impossible to protect life and property even if there is a perfect warning system. As a recent hurricane in Houston showed, despite the known dangers from combined hazards such as winds and floods, there is now insufficient time to evacuate some cities safely, even highly developed ones.

So there is a pressing need for cities to develop emergency refuge areas. In some cases these may already exist. For instance, Canvey Island in England still keeps its mound in case severe floods of the nature of 1953 return.

In most cases, however, refuges will need to be built from scratch. Thus, engineers and planners are considering how to identify and design such emergency centres, whether outside or within buildings, and how these should be connected to the wider urban system, including transportation.

Training populations to use the centres effectively is also essential. Refuges have successfully withstood cyclones and floods in Bangladesh and, unlike those in some other developing countries, have been used by vulnerable communities, because they could take their vital farm animals with them — without the animals they are destitute.

Emergency energy supplies for communities, which are essential for medical emergencies, should improve in future. This is especially so using advanced solar power — effective even in cloudy conditions.

Because of the failures to deal with some of the recent hazards impacting on megacities, governments at every level are planning for multiple hazards and developing strategies for managing the range of environmental factors which could emerge. Moreover, other research teams are collaborating in construction of ‘system dynamics’ models for the operation of infrastructure, environment and socio-economic aspects of megacities.

These models resemble well-known computer programmes for global climate change and its interconnections to economic developments. As with Delft’s coastal monitoring system, these will help cities to predict which hazards they face and help them decide how to prepare.

The London Mayor’s office is taking a particular interest in which policy options emerge as London continues to expand. Meanwhile, several European cities are experimenting with air quality hazard indicators based on complex system models to appraise citizens about how the environment in their cities varies hourly and over the longer term.

What these models need is improved availability of relevant environmental and socio-economic data. Here, international agencies such as the World Health Organisation and the World Meteorological Organisation, as well as national governments, need to collaborate with a wider range of organisations, and make maximum use of new media. This will better enable data showing how people experience both rapidly occurring hazards such as tornadoes, and slower, but still deadly, phenomenon such as loss of crops from rising sea levels and salt penetration.

Fortunately, megacities have a global organisation for information exchange and collaboration called C40 Cities. The future agenda here includes enhanced inter-city cooperation on policies for dealing with hazards, and putting more pressure on national governments to assist, especially with finance and data, and strategic priorities.

Lord Julian Hunt is Visiting Professor at Delft University and Vice Chairman of Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment (Globe). Professor Yuguo Li is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Hong Kong.

Image — Baby Cin gets a kiss from his mother Miran shortly after being born at Avista Adventist hospital in Louisville, Colorado near Denver at 2:41 a.m. local time October 31, 2011. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

By Lord Julian Hunt and Professor J. Srinivasan. The opinions expressed are their own.

It is more than a year since the devastating July and August 2010 floods in Pakistan that affected about 20 million people and killed an estimated 2,000. Many believe that the disaster was partially fuelled by global warming, and that there is a real danger that Pakistan, and the Indian subcontinent in general, could become the focus of much more regular catastrophic flooding.

Indeed, right now Pakistan is again experiencing massive flooding. The UN asserts that, already, more than 5.5 million people have been affected and almost 4300 are officially reported dead, 100 of them children.

Last year’s calamity, in particular, highlights the vulnerability of much of Asia to climate change, and has helped elevate this into one of the most important and pressing political and social issues in the region. Indeed, an increasingly prevailing view is that the impact of climate change could be worse in the region than all previous social, health and conflict disasters of the past.

In particular, there is growing recognition that global warming is dangerously linked to several significant threats, including not just natural disasters, but also energy, water, and food shortages as average rising temperatures reduce productivity and agricultural land is threatened by sea level rises and salinification of coastal areas.

Following the combination of last year’s Pakistani floods, and the exceptional heat waves in Russia, there is also now greater understanding in the region about the links between continental-scale weather events, and hence global risks to food availability. These linkages are likely to be exacerbated by adjustments in the patterns of atmosphere and ocean movements.

Reflecting this heightened concern, Asian prime ministers, legislators and business leaders are increasingly supporting new climate-related legislation, investments and research. They are also leveraging their growing influence at the United Nations to help secure a comprehensive, global warming deal.

This significant shift in Asian elite opinion has occurred despite the fact that it is now largely acknowledged within the region as unrealistic to expect total emissions from developed countries to be significantly reduced over the next few decades. Disappointment is often expressed, in particular, that the United States and Canada have no effective plans to follow European Union countries and Australia in introducing effective measures to make reductions.

There are numerous specific ways in which this “Asian consensus” on climate change is manifesting itself across the region.

First, low-lying islands and coastal areas. The great concern of these terrains – some of which are threatened by rising sea levels, combined with increasing frequency of the intense rainfall and the occasional typhoon and tsunami – is leading affected countries to play a very active role in international negotiations. Singapore has even instituted a climate change secretariat in its Prime Minister’s Office.

Moreover, there is considerable momentum to find new technical solutions. In Bangalore, for instance, companies are solving acute water shortages by hi-tech recycling and restoring depleted aquifers from the still plentiful monsoon rains.

Second, continental-scale Asian countries. Countries such as India and China, with dense centres of population and growing megacities, are thinking very seriously about responses to dangerous rises in temperature. In China, for instance, there has been a rise in temperature of two degrees Celsius since 1950, and the rise is anticipated to be greater than four degrees by 2100 if global emissions continue on predicted trends. To help prevent the looming problems associated with this, Beijing is harnessing new technologies to set ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions per unit of energy supplied by 40-45 percent by 2020.

Within such continental-scale Asian economies, requirements for energy and food are increasing rapidly as standards of living grow. In India, these two requirements are competing with each other in some areas where large power stations, coal mining and biomass projects all take land from farmers, threatening food supplies and local political stability.

But this problem is being mitigated by clean energy systems, such as wind power and the use of desert areas for direct solar production. Such projects are attracting international investment and funds for innovation.

Third, forests. Forests in Asia have been of concern since the 1920s when the Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore raised the alarm. Now the monitoring, conserving and responsible utilisation of forests is being regulated through national legislation, combined with the international funding arrangements of a UN programme to cut emissions resulting from deforestation in developing countries.

Politicians in the region increasingly realise that deforestation has devastating short-term impacts on rainfall reduction and lowering agricultural productivity, and also on health because of air pollution. These impacts can cross land and sea boundaries. Fortunately, areas of forest in India and China are now increasing again, although dense forest areas are still threatened in other Asian countries.

As encouraging as many of these initiatives are, the scale of the challenge means that debate in Asia is also turning to whether there are acceptable low-risk geo-engineering solutions to climate change. In a recent Indo-German experiment in the Indian Ocean, iron particles were released to increase absorption of carbon dioxide, but so far without success. Teams are also planning experiments to release droplets high in the stratosphere to cut solar radiation.

The International Maritime Organisation is meeting to consider a trial on the release of iron particles. This brings to the fore the question of which international organisations should accept responsibility for regulating geo-engineering. Indeed, many in Asia already believe that wholly new approaches to international governance will be needed to obtain a consensus in the region to tackle these unprecedented challenges.

Lord Julian Hunt is Vice Chair of Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment, and visiting professor at Delft University of Technology and the Malaysian Commonwealth Studies Centre, Cambridge. Professor J. Srinivasan is chairman of the Divecha Centre for Climate Change at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Image — In this image taken on August 7, 2010, marooned flood victims, including boy Mohammed Farhan, aged about 12, and Allah Dita, aged about 64, look to escape by grabbing onto the side bars of a hovering army helicopter which arrived to the village of Daya Chokha Gharbi to distribute cooked chick peas and rice to flood victims in Kot Adu located in southern Punjab’s Muzaffargarh district. REUTERS/Adrees Latif

]]>http://blogs.reuters.com/julianhunt/2011/10/11/pakistan-floods-show-asias-vulnerability-to-climate-change/feed/0Why we should still be constructive about Cancunhttp://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate-uk/2010/12/01/why-we-should-still-be-constructive-about-cancun/
http://blogs.reuters.com/julianhunt/2010/12/01/why-we-should-still-be-constructive-about-cancun/#commentsWed, 01 Dec 2010 12:01:50 +0000http://blogs.reuters.com/julianhunt/2010/12/01/why-we-should-still-be-constructive-about-cancun/By Julian Hunt

Lord Professor Julian Hunt is Vice President of GLOBE (Global Legislators for a Balanced Environment), Visiting Professor at Delft University, and former Director-General of the UK Met Office. The opinions expressed are his own.

Ahead of the UN Summit in Cancun, legislators from across the world, ranging from United States Congressman Bart Gordon to Chinese Congressman Wang Guangtao, met in China earlier this month at the GLOBE Climate Change Symposium. While the prospects for a comprehensive deal being reached in Mexico have been widely talked down, much progress can still be made and there remains substantial room for optimism.

Last year’s disastrous Copenhagen conference showed the lack of willingness of major countries to establish any meaningful international agreement to deal with the causes and impacts of man made climate change. This might involve only the developed countries reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), as in the Kyoto Protocol, or could also involve other countries with major emissions.

Neither of these scenarios seems likely to be achieved at Cancun. Currently, it seems that the meeting might just result in a set of statements by countries about what they are doing individually and in various multilateral arrangements — a disappointing, lower key re-run of Copenhagen.

However, it needs to be remembered that text in a communique does not reduce emissions in itself — it is action on the ground. In this context, there are reasons to be optimistic about recent legislative activity in developing countries. For instance, the Chinese announced at the GLOBE symposium that they are beginning a feasibility study into a new comprehensive climate change law.

Moreover, if a comprehensive deal isn’t reached, the summit still represents a remarkable opportunity for countries to assess the future more realistically and then explain and collaborate on the practical policies that need to be introduced in coming years. Seen from this prism, Cancun offers a stepping stone to secure a truly sustainable global deal in 2011 or beyond.

Under current plans, many industrialising countries will continue to increase their emissions. This is despite the fact that in most of the major emitting countries, administrative and innovative market mechanisms are incentivising industry to use energy more efficiently:

In China, financial rewards for reducing energy use provided by regional government are making substantial improvements in efficiency. These arrangements are evolving into local carbon markets, albeit small-scale and voluntary at this stage. Although the Kyoto Protocol does not apply to the emissions in China and other developing countries, where millions still live in extreme poverty, politicians in these countries nonetheless say that the Protocol does provide a policy framework for controlling emissions.

In the U.S., the Obama administration is relying on national regulations operated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to monitor and limit further emissions from major power plants. As green stimulus measures, such as the investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency, wind down, this work becomes more important.

The United States, China and the EU are planning to introduce new systems of monitoring GHG emissions, using remote sensing and ground based instrumentation, in order to have a reliable regulatory/incentivisation scheme.

EU countries have been emphasising different kinds of low carbon energy, such as wind, carbon sequestration and nuclear power, but have not been able to agree on priorities; indeed some countries have actually prevented international bodies, such as the World Bank and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change from promoting nuclear power (which was deliberately excluded from the conclusions of Copenhagen). There is more unanimity in the EU about promoting its policy of carbon trading to motivate industrial efficiency. Developing countries are also benefiting from carbon markets, for example in receiving funding in low carbon energy systems from the village level to clean power plants.

Other countries are focussing on preventing the rise of atmospheric GHG by expanding forestry. This is why some Latin American and EU legislators are considering how policies for natural conservation and preserving biodiversity should be an integral part of climate change policies.

Given this wide range of political, economic and technical approaches to climate change policy, it may be impossible to frame an international agreement that would satisfy all governments, businesses and also civil society groups. However, it should be possible to agree on a range of practical actions to mitigate climate change and deal with its effects on health, business, agriculture and natural disasters.

The rising costs of dealing with these effects, such as coastal defences, reducing desertification and urban overheating, mean that preventative actions have to begin now. They must not be delayed until economies grow further, as some influential economists keep arguing.

The legislators at the GLOBE symposium generally agreed that there are three areas where urgent collaborative action is now most urgently needed:

• Firstly, more information is needed about future levels of GHG, global climate change risks, especially on a regional basis, and the future impact on countries. Decision makers need to know more clearly what are the most likely scenarios as well as what targets are reasonable. Communities need also to be informed so they can contribute, as for example farmers do in Mali, by measuring and communicating the local climate and ecology as it changes. The best way for improving information exchange is the international framework of international collaboration through UN agencies.

• Secondly, information about practical actions by countries and regions for mitigation and adaptation also needs to be exchanged, as was agreed in principle at Copenhagen. Members of GLOBE are already exchanging experiences about legislation and its effectiveness in countries with very different experiences about climate change and views about possible solutions. However, more work is needed to make this a reality, with transfer of know-how to developing countries.

• Thirdly, more collaboration is needed in implementing policies. This should build on national, regional or sectoral initiatives, for example in carbon trading, funding adaptation in developing countries, and developing new technologies for global application, such as desalination, plant breeding and genetic engineering of the new crops for a changing climate. Also key are social programmes for the millions of people who are likely to be displaced by the effects of desertification and rising sea levels, and probably melting of mountain snows.

For those, such as myself, who believe that global warming is the greatest danger to humanity in the twenty first-century, it is to be hoped that agreement can be reached in these areas so that we can move nearer towards a comprehensive and effective deal. We simply cannot afford to see the shambles of Copenhagen repeated in Cancun.

-Lord Julian Hunt is visiting Professor at Delft University, and former Director-General of the UK Met Office. The opinions expressed are his own.-

The unusually large rainfall from this year’s monsoon has caused the most catastrophic flooding in Pakistan for 80 years, with the U.N. estimating that around one fifth of the country is underwater. This is thus truly a crisis of the very first order.

Heavy monsoon precipitation has increased in frequency in Pakistan and Western India in recent years. For instance, in July 2005, Mumbai was deluged by almost 950 mm (37 inches) of rain in just one day, and more than 1,000 people were killed in floods in the state of Maharashtra. Last year, deadly flash floods hit Northwestern Pakistan, and Karachi was also flooded.

It is my clear view that this trend is being fueled both by global warming (which also means extremes of rainfall are also a growing world-wide trend), and indeed potentially by any intensification of the El-Nino/La-Nino cycle.

To understand the reasons why global warming is playing a role here, one needs to look at the main climatic trends in South Asia. In addition to more extreme rainfall events, there is also a decreasing thickness of ice over the Tibetan plateau and changing patterns of precipitation, with less snow at higher levels, plus more rapid run off from mountains.

The less stable atmosphere also leads to more airflow over mountains and less lateral deviation — so that the monsoon winds and precipitation can be higher in North West India and Pakistan and weaker in North East. In 2006, there was an unusually intense drought in Assam and rain in North West India. This year with the strong precipitation in North West, there is no pronounced decrease in rains in North East.

Recent U.S. studies have also concluded that the mountain meteorology is changing but as a result of the aerosols emitted into the atmosphere from urban areas of South Asia.

The biggest question going forwards is whether the El-Nino southern oscillation, that determines the large 10 year oscillations of weather across the whole Pacific basin and into South Asia and Africa, will change.

Although there is no scientific consensus on this, it seems likely to me that if the Amazon rain forest continues to disappear, and snow/ice melt significantly increases over the Tibetan plateau, there will be significant changes in enso climatic fluctuations as rises in temperature over land areas become comparable with the areas of the Pacific where currently the temperature fluctuates over a few degrees — which is now better monitored and computer modeled.
The reason for concern about changing enso is that depending on its periodic strength, it greatly affects magnitudes and locations of floods, droughts, hurricanes. Until about 2020-2030, these natural fluctuations are expected to be greater than man-made changes (as was pointed out by many scientists in the 1990s).

Given the massive stakes in play, not least because of the sizeable proportion of the world population impacted, these issues need urgent study and also preparations on the ground by the affected countries.

Picture Caption: A flood victim sits with his belongings while waiting to be evacuated in a flooded village in Jacobabad, about 78 km (40 miles) from Sukkur in Pakistan’s Sindh province August 15, 2010. REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro

-Lord Julian Hunt is a Visiting Professor at Delft University of Technology. The opinions expressed are his own.-

In their different ways, the disruption and damage caused by the ongoing Icelandic Volcano eruption, and the major oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, have underlined how low-probability events can wreak havoc locally and across the world.

Both events underline the continuing need for well-established crisis response by international bodies. Risk assessments taking into account all the diverse scientific and social interactions should enable the public and private sector to prepare in advance.

• Although international procedures by UN bodies for dealing simultaneously with volcanic eruptions, meteorology and aviation had been agreed and tested at a technical level since the 1990s, the disruption caused by the Icelandic volcano led EU Transport Ministers call for quicker and more coordinated reaction to such crisis situations.

• In the Gulf of Mexico, the “unprecedented environmental disaster” from the oil spillage shows the need for environmental risk assessment as much as economic risks now being considered in the context of the volcano.

While the volcano and oil spills have causes and consequences that can be explained in terms of earth science, engineering, ecology and economics, other disruptive events with rapid global impacts can result simply from people’s actions — notably the fall of Lehman Brothers and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Taken as a whole, the growing global attention being paid to these types of urgent, international, complex and inter-connected problems have led a group of scientists, working with policymakers from the European Commission, and the private sector, to collaborate in new ways to explore how they could be dealt with more effectively in future.

Particular emphasis is being paid to Global System Dynamics when they are applied to making decisions, consulting with the public and identifying critical research problems for the future.

Essentially these systems involve data input and output, models, networking with other systems and decision making. The role of feedback through public consultation is an essential but poorly understood part of the process.

From philosophical and multi–disciplinary beginnings in the 1920’s, applications of systems methods for industry and defence began in the 1940s.

With the emergence of regional and global environmental problems of pollution, concerns about the devastating effects of nuclear war, planning the future resources of the planet, and then dealing with climate change, the global systems dynamics approach with ever growing computer power has become the only method available for policy making, with of course a thorough going involvement of social sciences.

Systems analysis is not yet the accepted method for managing financial crises, but it is suggesting some of the instabilities that have contributed to the most recent international recession. This could be a valuable tool for developing regulation policies for the highly computerised financial networks.

Can global systems science provide insights and quantitative methods to policy makers, beyond the usual, but essential, approaches of cost-benefit, political factors (which may be quite scientific such as the use of focus groups), historical example and crisis response planning?

One answer comes from several private sector entities which are employing dynamic, time varying computer models of present and future behaviour of the natural, technological and social components of activities or organisations.

For instance, the French utility company Veolia uses system models to discuss policy options with city authorities. In this case, the requirement for integrated civic policies has meant that the system models had to be integrated.

These practical demonstrations provide lessons for how public organisations and politics can apply the systems approach in their domain. Guide books and road maps are already being written to promote this development through a project funded by the European Commission.

Information technologies are playing a key role in establishing the enhanced interfaces and appropriate communication channels needed between science, policy and society. A recent development of highly focused data provision is the use of Twitter by environmental agencies to send out topical warning messages.

Technical advances in information science are going beyond software engineering, model specification and formal methods to address the inherent speed limits for man-machine interactions, which when exceeded can cause so-called ‘flash-crash’ disruptions in the financial markets.

There are also other limits to the complexity and size of the models that are used. Firstly system models that rely on the gathering and managing of large scale, heterogeneous sets of diverse data use ever larger and more energy consuming computing capacity. Will the current requirements of 5-7 MW in the largest centres keep on increasing?

Secondly, as computer programmes become larger and more complex, their reliability can become questionable since the only evidence that they are correct is verified by the highly skilled, but unsystematic process of looking at the results of thousands of calculations and studying their patterns. Computer science has not yet been able to find a fool-proof proof!

Social and political aspects in the gathering, analysis and dissemination of data also have to be recognised. For social administration and security systems, intrusive searching for data must be minimised, which means that the most advanced ICT methods are needed for the most efficient use of data for analysis and decision making.

Political negotiations about climate change and the controversies about the scientific data have highlighted the need for wide communication of the policy process and about different sources and methods of analysis of data. Without this openness and public trust, systems based decisions will always be suspect.

The challenge for science is therefore two-fold: to advance modeling of global systemsand to engage with novel forms of interaction with policy, with regard to problems that span from local to global decision-making.

Global research initiatives are underway leading to data, with new ICT and remote sensing methods, and development of models in diverse global contexts such as city systems, conflicts between societies and nations, water and food security, climate change impact, and the dynamics and regulation of financial systems.

As global systems science becomes more directed towards policy making, research and practice it is focusing on:

• Understanding and explaining better how the ways that individuals and organisations deal with issues that can be described by the methods of systems analysis. The next step is to use the basic steps of data, modeling, and communication/consultation to make improvements noting that there are many levels of complexity and cost and consultation. These steps can be effective from giving conceptual and qualitative advice to providing massive quantitative policy recommendations derived from extensive computation.

• Developing techniques and concepts for systems approaches to: (a) assist integrated policy making such as managing complex crises or the connected energy, environmental and resource aspects of sustainable development strategies; and (b) to predict the dynamical behaviour of different types of organisation, which for example can depend on how its parts are connected, or how events in the system develop in time; sometimes chaotic fluctuations are followed by sudden changes, as occurs in organisational as well as volcanic eruptions and in the pattern of communications chatter before critical events.

Arguably, the world of science and decision making should be encouraged by the growing and open collaboration between different disciplines from economists to engineers and biologists in exploring new policies for dealing with natural disasters and societal failures with their global impacts.

Many international organisations, both public and private, are constructively involved. Serious disruption has resulted, but long term physical and social disaster has been generally been averted.

In dealing with the multi-decadal problem of global warming and wholesale destruction of biodiversity, global systems analysis is even more relevant as a framework for considering all the scientific, technological and social interactions.

In addition it is accepted as a framework for specialists in countries with differing policies and scientific understanding to discuss controversial issues, as was evident at an EU-China seminar last May when China presented its policy position very clearly.

Hopefully, if this approach is adopted more widely, international scientific and political understanding will improve and practical climate change measures will be agreed before it is too late.

Picture Credit: Stray horses cross a road in Eyjafjoll May 16, 2010, as the volcano under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland continued to erupt with an ash plume reaching heights of 25,000 feet. REUTERS/Ingolfur Juliusson

- Julian Hunt is visiting professor at Delft University and formerly director general of the UK Meteorological Office. The opinions expressed are his own.-

In the past few weeks, there has been a steady stream of stories highlighting major concerns over scientific evidence relating to climate change. One example has been the world-wide furore relating to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) assertion that all Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

Going forwards, as the UK Government Chief Scientist Professor John Beddington has stated strongly, standards of openness about sources, verification and presentation must be at the highest level.

The most regrettable implication of recent events is that further confusion has been sown amongst global publics about climate change. What I believe most people want now is enlightenment, not further argument, about what might be the gravest issue confronting humanity in the twenty first century.

One of the key challenges for scientists and indeed politicians is communicating the reality of climate change to global publics in an accurate and intelligible way. Contrary to belief in some quarters, the leading models that forecast global climate temperature in decades ahead are reliable and this is strongly supported by satellite data.

Dismissive views expressed about climate predictions are often based on the uncertainty of long range weather forecasts. However, this is false because even sceptics know how long it takes to heat water in a sauce pan and that it does not depend on understanding the eddy movements in the pan (which are analogous to weather patterns and are only approximately described by models).

What is needed is more openness and clarity about the huge complexity of the climate change phenomenon. For instance, over the last decade, while the earth’s land surface has been warming overall, trends of weather and climate records reveal larger and more unusual regional and local variations — some unprecedented since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago.

Among such warning signs are the disappearing ice fields around the poles and on all mountain ranges, more frequent droughts in Africa and now in wet regions (such as the 2006 drought in Assam India, previously one of the wettest places in the world), floods in dry regions (as recently, the worst floods in 50 years in northwest India), and ice storms in sub-tropical China in 2008 (for the first time in 150 years).

What these data patterns underline is that, while climate change is a reality, it is impacting regions and indeed sub-regions of the world in very different ways.

Although such variations are approximately predicted by global climate models such as the IPCC’s, these data-sets need buttressing with more local measurements and studies for sub-national governments, industry and agriculture to better understand their climatic situation and develop reliable and effective strategies to deal with all the ways that climate change affects their activities and well being.

Post-Copenhagen, adopting this approach is especially crucial as we may be heading towards a future in which no long-term, comprehensive successor to the Kyoto regime is even politically possible at the international level. One of the chief flaws in the Copenhagen negotiations was the fact that the negotiations were aimed at an ambitious top level deal that did not account for political imperatives in developed and developing countries.

Experience shows that an ‘bottom-up’ approach works very effectively. Publics and businesses are far more likely to believe local monitoring reports on climate change. Moreover, it is only when sub-national areas learn how they will be specifically affected that grassroots action can often be aroused.

This latter lesson was one I learned as a City Councillor in Cambridge in the 1970s when I helped introduce air pollution measurements to show the effects of traffic in the city’s town centre. Once the high air pollution was measured and better understood by local people, traffic control measures were quickly introduced.
I am therefore delighted at the increasing numbers of regional monitoring centres across the world which, by communicating and interpreting climate change predictions and uncertainties, are contributing towards local adaptation plans:
• In China, where provinces require targets for power station construction, regional environmental and climate change centres are now well developed.
• In the United States, a recent report has highlighted the value of non-official centres, such as a severe storm centre in Oklahoma, which gives independent advice to communities and businesses, while relying on government programmes for much of the data.
• In Brazil, a regional data centre is providing data and predictions about agriculture and deforestation and informs legislation about policy options.

What this activity points to is the need for a broader global network of such centres to support national climate initiatives, and to facilitate international funding and technical cooperation in delivering the right information to the right place, at the right time.

Local actions can only be effective if measurements of climate and environment are made regularly and are publicised as well as information about targets, and projections of emissions. Experience shows that full exposure is needed about what is happening, what is planned, and how every individual can be involved (as the Danes show by their community investment in wind power).

Moreover, as legislators in Globe (Global legislators for a balanced environment) and city governments across the world are already putting into practice, adaptation to climate change also needs to build on existing knowledge and infrastructures in local settings.

Forming loose collaborative networks will enable regional facilitation centres, their experts and decision makers to learn from one another and also draw upon the resources of existing national and international databases and programmes, such as the growing number of consortia linking major cities, local governments, and the private sector.

The overall message is clear. ‘Localisation of action and data’ must be the post-Copenhagen priority if we are to facilitate public understanding of climate change and truly tackle the menace it poses.

- Julian Hunt is visiting professor at Delft University and formerly director general of the UK Meteorological Office; Elsie Owusu is with Just Ghana, based in Ghana and UK; Arun Shrestha is the director of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Nepal; Charles Kennel is distinguished professor emeritus, University of California in San Diego. The opinions expressed are their own. -

Nobel Laureates, industries and political leaders are emphasising the seriousness of global warming and climate change and calling for global action to reduce the accelerating trends of greenhouse gas emissions. But it is equally vital for regions to initiate their own policies to deal with the growing impacts of climate change on their environments and their communities.

Since 1997, the trends of weather and climate records reveal larger and more unusual variations in regions around the world, some unprecedented since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. Among such warning signs are the disappearing ice fields around the poles and on all mountain ranges, more frequent droughts in Africa and now in wet regions (such as northeast India in 2006), floods in dry regions (as recently, in northwest India), and ice storms in sub-tropical China in 2008 (for the first time in 150 years).

Such extreme events threaten sustainable development around the world, natural environments are destroyed irreversibly, and economic growth is slowed.

Our proposition is that adaptation to climate change needs to build on existing knowledge and infrastructures in each region’s own setting. Forming loose collaborative networks will enable regional facilitation centres, their experts and decision makers to learn from one another and draw upon the resources of existing national and international databases and also programmes, such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the growing number of consortia linking major cities, local governments, and the private sector.

In May 2009, at the University of California, San Diego, experts from Asian regional centres based in India, Nepal and China compared their observed trends, long-range predictions and policies for regional climate and water resources with those of California. The California Climate Action Team predicts that global warming will cause the loss of the state’s remaining glaciers and most of its snow pack by 2100, which will seriously affect the State’s approach to water management. But some coastal zones are cooling as marine air is drawn into a warming Central Valley. Politics for water, agriculture, and ecosystems are affected zone-by-zone.

The Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau are also losing ice and snow, caused by the direct effects of global warming, and also the indirect effects of aerosols from industry, traditional cooking, more intensive agriculture, and wind-blown natural dust. Water supplies for a billion people are threatened. Regional environmental polices for the indirect effects should benefit both the local climate and health as well as agriculture. But there may be also global benefit as aerosols from Asia are carried by winds around the globe and impact the snow-pack of California’s Sierra Nevada.

In the West African coastal zone the observed rise in temperature and decrease in rainfall is affecting agriculture and the environment of the growing urban areas. Just as in California, these trends differ significantly from those further inland – another example of the need for local data related to local policies. But in the Sahel and in India regional actions are benefiting the local climate and environment through extensive tree planting.

The global computer model results assembled by the IPCC provide broad guidance about temperature change at regional levels. But their predictions about future rain and snow are not reliable enough for planning at the regional scale. Thus improved projections of past and future trends are needed on a region-by-region basis. More detailed simulations, statistics of long-term cycles, and a close look at local trends are required. Sizeable margins for error are therefore necessary in planning for water management and agriculture. Regional centres, by communicating and interpreting these predictions and uncertainties can contribute to local adaptation policies.

Collaborative studies this year between Ghana, Uganda and UK suggest that non profit or charitable organisations might be able to facilitate with minimal cost the sharing of expertise and the exchange of data, for example in private agriculture, tourism and conservation projects. Anthropologists studying climate change have pointed out that observations of farmers and villagers are also useful for monitoring and can provide a unique perspective of climate change over years and decades.

Since 1997 the availability of rainfall and environmental data is improving in many countries, through the urgings of the World Meteorological Organisation. But restrictions about the international exchange of observational data and warnings about natural hazards are partly being overcome by regional collaboration, for example, in improved international warnings along the Brahmaputra river in India and Bangladesh.

In the U.S., a recent report points out the value of non-official centres, such as a severe storm centre in Oklahoma, which gives independent advice to communities and businesses, while relying on government programmes for much of the data.
In Brazil, a regional data centre is providing current data and predictions about agriculture and deforestation and informs legislation about policy options. In China, where provinces require targets for power station construction, regional environmental and climate change centres are well developed.

A network of regional centres is needed to support national and sub-regional climate initiatives and to facilitate international funding and technical cooperation. The cumulative effect of regional action may well determine the speed and effectiveness of global responses to climate change.